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Someone who didn’t appear to be having a good time? The tall, dark-haired guy who’d laughed at Dawes back in the locker room.

One of the other guys had called him Callahan, his voice laced with awe. The name jogged something loose in my memory, but I couldn’t place why. Based on the covert looks the other guys here kept giving him, I more than got the impression I should definitely know who he was.

The only thing I knew for certain about him was that he was a bit of a dick.

Okay, so I also knew—and it pained me to admit it—that he was one of the most naturally gifted skaters I’d ever seen.

Kind of shocking, really, given his size. Players with higher centers of gravity like his usually struggled to control tight turns and quick direction changes. But control was not his problem. He had half a second on everyone here, and it wasn’t because he was pushing harder, either.

I hated how much I wanted to know how he’d learned to skate like that.

I told myself to look away—to focus on my own shit—but every time I glanced over, I caught him watching me, too, his head twisting to track my movements across the ice. The crazy thing was, where I expected to see a smirk or a sneer, he looked … impressed.

And if someone that good was impressed by me, maybe I wasn’t as bad off as I feared.

Coming into camp, I’d known my conditioning was shit, and that I wasn’t going to be able to hide that fact. While all these other guys had likely spent their summers with fancy-ass trainers who cost more per hour than I made in a day at the marina, I was out in the fucking sun all day, every day, hauling gas cans, scrubbing down party boats, and pretending not to notice every time that old pervert Mr. Bergstrom hit on me.

So to have this guy’s attention? It was the fuel I needed to kick it into high gear.

When the neutral zone regroup came around, I put everything I had into it—showing off a little bit, maybe. The puck came back to me on the swing, and I saw a lane on the weak side before the coverage did. I put the pass through the seam to the winger, already a step past his man. He carried it over the line clean, zero traffic, and snapped a shot on net.

“Good read, Porter,” Coach Hendricks’s voice rang out, and I had to fight not to grin like an idiot.

Board battles came next, which was where I couldn’t keep up the act any longer, and my game started going sideways.

I lost the first one against some kid who was two hundred pounds of coiled aggression with fresher legs, but won the second on a little hips-under-the-stick trick my first junior coach had taught me. By the third one, my legs were gone. I tried to push off the boards, but my right one basically told me to go fuck myself.

I gave the kid who’d just beat me a little tap on the shin pad with my stick, the universal hockey gesture for “nice one,” and skated off, hoping to project the aura of a guy who had his shit together.

To be clear, my shit was not together.

My shit was, in fact, rapidly falling apart.

The conditioning skate was where I died, but wasn't that the whole point? Whistle. Go. Whistle. Go. Blue line. Red line. Blue line again. Down and back. Down and back.

My lungs were on fire, and the Gatorade I’d choked down earlier was sloshing around in my stomach. I could feel sweat running into my eyeballs, and I knew in a clinical, detached sort of way that I was going to hurl.

But I put my head down and pushed through one more rep because I refused to be the first guy out here puking up his guts. Thankfully, about two minutes later, I heard it happen behind me—a retch followed by a splatter—and I felt a small, guilty glimmer of relief.

Two reps later, my reprieve was over.

I broke from the line and skated hard for the boards, yanking my chin strap loose and shoving my helmet back. Bright red Gatorade came arcing out of me like a special effect in a low-budget horror movie. It hit the boards, the ice, and my gloves. Some of it landed on the toe of my right skate. More of it went sliding down the plexi in a long, bright smear.

Then came another heave. A smaller one, thank Christ, but no less violent. I braced my hands against the glass, watching my own horrified reflection. Sweat was dripping off my nose, and my hair stuck to my forehead. A thread of red-tinged spit hung off my bottom lip.

Day one, and I’d lasted one fucking skate. Hell, not even one.

I pictured the coaches watching from wherever they were stationed, tablets in hand, making notes about me. I pictured Bergstrom back in Minneapolis, leaning against his truck, smiling that smarmy fucking smile of his when I’d inevitably have to ask for my old job back. I pictured my mom telling me it was fine, like I hadn’t just blown the chance my family had been banking on for the last several years.

Then I shut all of that down and straightened, dragging my sleeve across my mouth. I spat twice and cleared my throat before squaring my shoulders the way my mom did when she’d just gotten bad news but had no choice but to continue on.

I turned and skated back to the line.

The guy next to me glanced over as I slotted in, his eyes flicking first to my jersey, then my mouth, his expression somewhere between sympathy and “thank-god-that-wasn’t-me.”

“I don’t think that’s what they mean by tasting the rainbow,” I said with what I hoped was a confident smirk.

He choked on a laugh, turned it into a cough, and then dragged his attention back to the action on the ice.